International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy 2008, 8, 3, 287-294 Skinner’s Verbal Behavior Kurt Salzinger1 Hofstra University, USA ABSTRACT The author reviews the book that B. F. Skinner considered to be his most important work, namely Verbal Behavior in terms of its content and effect on the field. He considers such elements as the paucity of experiments, the host of allusions to literature and the masterful behavior analysis directed at elucidating verbal behavior, the latter constituting an admi- rable example of how behavior analysis can be applied to other forms of behavior as well. Keywords: Skinner, verbal behavior, conditioning of verbal behavior, tact, mand, autoclitic, Chomsky. RESUMEN El autor revisa el libro que B.F. Skinner consideraba su obra más importante, Conducta Verbal, con respecto a su contenido y a su efecto sobre el campo de estudio. En ello toma en consideración elementos del libro tales como la escasez de experimentos, la multitud de alusiones a la literatura, y el magistral análisis conductual dirigido a elucidar el com- portamiento verbal. Este último elemento constituye un ejemplo admirable de cómo el análisis conductual puede ser también aplicado a otras formas de comportamiento. Palabras clave: Skinner, conducta verbal, condicionamiento de la conducta verbal, tacto, mando, autoclítico, Chomsky. The book that B. F. Skinner considered to be his most important work (Salzinger, 1990), namely Verbal Behavior continues to be both unexamined and much maligned and therefore basically misunderstood. It was also, ironically enough, an important stimulus for the so called cognitive psychology revolution, the antithesis of Skinner’s approach. It became that through Chomsky’s (1959) review, usually associated with the adjective “devastating.” In a sense, it provided a rallying cry for those psychologists who hated behavior analysis and who felt the review freed them to use their vocabulary of vague terms of inference, about subjects’ mental states and mental way stations to explain how people understood language rather than what controlled their emission of verbal behavior. Thus, the controversy between Skinner and Chomsky is really one in which ships pass one another in the night rather than constituting a disagreement about the same phenomena. In the case of Chomsky it is also vituperative; in the case of Skinner it is simply a matter of ignoring the criticism. Chomsky’s much vaunted review 1 Correspondence concerning this article should be adressed to the author: Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549, United States. Email: [email protected]. 288 KURT SALZINGER was in some ways even more an attack on what he took to be behavior analysis in general than on the book on verbal behavior. His long review mentioned many psychologists (neobehaviorists, partial behaviorists and nonbehaviorists) many of whom conformed to his idea of what Skinner’s system was all about but which did not reflect it. That that review was unfair and offered a false impression of what the book dealt with was unfortunate, as was the much delayed response to the review, not by Skinner, who claimed never to have actually read it all (Skinner, 1983), but by MacCorquodale in 1970. If that were not enough, behavior analysts lamented the lack of experiments that the book engendered or contained, although now psychologists use the book’s nomenclature to describe the instatement of verbal behavior in children who have none as well as construct experiments to test the nature of the concepts. Skinner’s book on verbal behavior had another effect (at least on me) besides that of explicating his ideas of how to explain the emission of verbal behavior. It showed how one can take rather complicated behavior and explain it in terms of behavior analytic terms and principles. Finally, it should have served to eliminate the bias that many behavior analysts suffered from, that is, from believing that behavior was restricted to doing to the exclusion of saying. For years, many behavior analysts viewed verbal behavior as essentially an epiphenomenon that would come along as long as we worked on nonverbal behavior. Yet even a little bit of thought makes clear, that particularly in complex civilizations, it is talk that produces the most important reinforcers and it is talk that allows one to avoid the most egregious consequences. Skinner was challenged to show how behavior analysis could explain this most important of all classes of behavior, thus making the act of convincing his fellow behaviorists to include verbal behavior in their research most important. In addition, of course, he was equally interested in responding to the challenge of making anti-behaviorists aware that behavior analysis was up to this very complicated task. It is also noteworthy that Skinner’s interest in verbal behavior even while he had done such important and original work with nonverbal behavior comes at least in part from his early interest in creative writing. What makes the book so difficult to understand are his many literary references, references that appeal to those of us who, like him, enjoy literature as opposed to some current students who simply find those references difficult. Indeed, it is possible that the rise of cognitive therapy stems from the stereotype that behaviorists do not deal with verbal behavior; they simply want to see action and when they modify behavior which is the most important thing one can do, they are referring to doing not talking. Had Skinner’s book been more accepted by both behaviorists and cognitive psychologists, perhaps they would not have believed that behavior analysis does not allow one to talk to patients (Salzinger, 1992) but that one can only reinforce their nonverbal behavior. But now it is 50 years since the book first appeared. Why do we not pay more attention to it now? To begin with, behavior analysts did see the need to explore the most basic relations between verbal behavior and its controlling variables. Indeed many of us spent a good deal of time investigating simply how to increase the frequency of various response classes. Even more basically, we spent time and effort demonstrating that it is reinforcement that can control verbal behavior. It is fair to say that this phase © Intern. Jour. Psych. Psychol. Ther. http://www.ijpsy.com SKINNER'S VERBAL BEHAVIOR 289 of the study of verbal behavior began with Greenspoon’s (1955) study of plural nouns. I still recall coming across a colleague of mine who knowing of my interest in verbal behavior asked me what I thought of the Greenspoon “effect” as if a completely unheard of phenomenon was discovered. There was great excitement among behavior analysts having shown empirically that one can successfully modify verbal behavior in a systematic manner by the administration of reinforcers. A few years later, we (Salzinger, Portnoy, Zlotogura, & Keisner, 1963) replicated that experiment and extended it to continuous verbal behavior, i.e., speaking in sentences rather than in a word association manner. We found that what had been conditioned was not just the class of plural nouns but certain subclasses, that is, plural nouns ending in the sound z or s. We showed that the response class that is conditioned may not always be what the experimenter intended; it depends in part on the strength of the response class impinged upon (its history) before the experiment takes place. At the same time as Greenspoon’s experiment, Verplanck (1955) published an article on the control of the content of conversation. He showed that one could increase the expression of opinion statements by the mere application of verbal statements of agreement. My group did research on the clinical interview (e.g., Salzinger & Pisoni, 1958) showing that with the appropriate use of verbal reinforcers one could increase or decrease the occurrence of verbal affect statements in both schizophrenia patients as well as in normal subjects, that one could increase or decrease the amount of speech in general as well as that of self description (Salzinger, Portnoy, & Feldman, 1964). Indeed, we found that when you make the reinforcement contingent on a specific response class such as we did in these experiments, changes take place first in the broadest class, in this case speech in general, then a change in self-referred statements and finally statements of self referred affect which reflected the specific contingency on the basis of which we reinforced the verbal behavior. We (Portnoy and Salzinger, 1965) were also able to demonstrate that the reinforcement of one type of verbal statement (positive affect) was more likely to generalize to the emission of negative affect statements (and vice versa) than to neutral ones. Not enough studies of this nature took place, perhaps because such studies are difficult to do and take a lot of time. Nevertheless, interest in these effects resulted in a surge of studies of a more mechanical nature; these studies required less time to do. For example, subjects were shown slides that contained three pronouns and a common verb and asked to choose one of the pronouns to complete the sentence. The experimenter then reinforced sentences with one of the pronouns. The obvious nature of these experiments resulted in a controversy of whether verbal conditioning could only occur with awareness and therefore did not demonstrate much about conditioning; some psychologists maintained these experiments showed that the conditioning effect was a pseudo-effect in that subjects who increased in the use of reinforced verbal statements were simply cooperating with the experimenter, an experimental artifact. What many of those experiments demonstrated was rule governed behavior. According to that, subjects simply instructed themselves to emit one pronoun or another after a few trials in which the use of one or another of them resulted in the experimenter saying “right” or words of that kind.